Nonunion state job-holders could benefit

By Rick Karlin

Updated 10:35 am, Wednesday, September 18, 2013

A bill creating a commission that could help enact raises for thousands of nonunion state workers has been sent to Gov. Andrew Cuomo's desk.

The concerned class of "management/confidential" employees hasn't had a broad-based raise since 2009. Under the proposal — which lawmakers approved last spring — a special seven-member commission would make recommendations and mandate salary increases for the state workers on a four-year cycle.

"This is long overdue," said Joe Sano, executive director of the Organization of New York State Management Confidential Employees.

There are 8,500 management/confidential employees, ranging from top managers to secretaries who work in "confidential" jobs where they access material such as employee records. Counting those in the court system and at state university offices, the number rises to about 9,200.

Contractual pay for the class was frozen under Gov. David Paterson, who at the time was dealing with budgetary fallout of the 2008 financial crash. Since then, the state's major unions, including the Civil Service Employees Association and Public Employees Federation, have received raises — although in 2011 the unions and others agreed to austerity contracts that include givebacks on items like furlough days and health care costs, and three years without broad-based increases.

With their pay frozen, supervisors in some cases earn less than the unionized people they supervise, and that has made union members reluctant to be promoted to jobs with more responsibility.

While some of the workers are in high-level positions or have been promoted up through the ranks, others are in secretarial jobs that access confidential information in the course of their work.

The governor has until the end of Sept. 27 to approve or veto the measure; approval can come through signing a bill or simply letting it become law.

While it remains unclear if the bill will pass or fail, observers have noted that even were it to be vetoed, the governor could begin to give management/confidential workers raises administratively. That way, he could maintain more control.

Under the bill, the governor could appoint three of seven members to the panel. Recommendations from the commission could be "modified or abrogated by statute" — meaning lawmakers could vote to change the findings if they wanted to.

The commission is modeled on a similar panel created to set pay for judges. Two years ago, a seven-member group granted judges a 27 percent pay increase over seven years.

Judges had previously gone more than a decade without a raise. Their pay was historically linked to that of lawmakers before the change.

Some management/confidential workers have gotten increases aside from across-the-board raises earlier this year.

In April, as lawmakers were putting the legislation forward, the administration approved "step" increases or longevity bonuses that had been scheduled to go out last year. That applied to roughly half the total number of the workers.

Correction: An earlier version of this story gave an inaccurate count of the number of years CSEA and PEF workers will go without broad-based raises under their current contracts.